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I’ve been using SeaTools to try and find out the nature of the problem with my Seagate hard drive ST3750630AS. It was fine until the kids decided to have some friends round for a sleepover and one of them crashed headlong into the computer desk and sent the whole lot to the floor. It’s a 750GB drive with over a year’s research for my degree and I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t been making regular backups, as I should have been. Even though we have an ICT guy breathing down our necks to do just that. Anyway running SeaTools tells me that the drive has ‘Bad LBA 0’ which is not repaired and “Bad LBA 249’ which is also not repaired. It then goes on to tell me the test has failed and therefore the MBR and partition tables have gone. The volume of the drive is now zero although I know there is stuff on the drive. It seems though that every time I run this test SeaTools tell me there are bad sectors appearing and that sectors of the disc are unreadable although as I have already pointed out the drive is full of data. Would you be able to help me restore this data please otherwise I’m going to have to drop back in order to catch up at Uni.

Hello there is there any chance you could help me? I have been using Seagate drives since I had my first computer and have never encountered any problems with them. Unfortunately though the latest drive I have in my computer is a Seagate U series 6 60GB drive running at 5400RPM PATA drive. I’ve been using a Maxtor drive on the same cable set up and there hasn’t been any problem but now though the Seagate drive has begun to make a strange noise as it boots up or when it shuts down. I disconnected the Maxtor drive and have been running it on a separate cable in case the two are conflicting with each other but the noise has continued. Now the Seagate drive is reporting errors and is proving harder and harder to access when I boot up. Loading Windows Vista from the drive is taking ages and it seems that chkdsk wants to be constantly running and repairing errors. I’ve tried a third party disk repair tool which tells me that the drive is ok but the problem persists and now I’m worried that my backups are going to fail. Is there anything that can be done to repair the drive or should I take a hit and replace it?

Seagate Disk Repair

Seagate are a well-known manufacturer of hard drives and external drives for desktop, laptop and server machines. With a variety of different sizes available Seagate have been, for some years now, a market leader when it comes to supplying hard drives for a wide spectrum of computer manufacturers.

You may well be viewing this on a computer fitted with a Seagate drive without even knowing it.

Seagate drives are for the most part reliable, but just like any other make of hard drive or storage device, are prone to their own errors.

A common error that Seagate drive users encounter is when a targeted read test is carried out. This is when the computer you have the drive installed in finds that there are errors on the drive and decides to run a diagnostic test.

This is a problem that is specific to Dell models such as the Inspirion 1545 which has a Seagate drive ST9320325AS installed but which is now no longer within warranty.

This particular fault is such that you may be able to continue using the hard drive for a period of time after the initial reporting of a problem but will eventually become such that the hard drive finally fails to spin up upon booting the computer. When this occurs it may prove difficult if not impossible to access the information contained on the drive especially when the boot sector is rendered useless and prevents the operating system from loading.

An important factor to take into account here is that if you are using a Dell computer and the SMART diagnostics is tripped whilst booting the Seagate ST9320325AS drive (also referred to as the Momentus) the drive will inevitably fail.

If the SMART diagnostics test is tripped you will not be able to access any of the data stored on said drive and as such the drive, in your estimation, may well be less than worthless. This is because the number of reported bad sectors has reached 2823 or above.

Simply put your Seagate hard drive has significant bad sectors to render it impossible to boot through normal means. You will also find that if you are in a position to run the SMART diagnostics test (which not all users are able to when this occurs it should be noted) then the reported number of uncorrectable sectors has reached in excess of 7514.

If this is the case then you should seek to replace the drive at the first opportunity but before you do that you should be able to recover the data therein with the help of www.belfastdatarecovery.co.uk.